SPRING BREAKER'S DEATH STILL UNSOLVED A YEAR LATER

A year ago today, 10 high school students from Trumbull, Conn., arrived in Fort Lauderdale, primed to play and party. Two weeks later, their Spring Break had become a tragic memory.

Nine of the youths had to return home without the 10th -- Susan Jacques.

The last thing anyone is certain of is that Jacques left her beachfront motel room alone in the middle of the night. Three days later, on April 29, 1986, the 18-year-old's body was found about 35 miles away, floating in a canal west of Delray Beach.

Little has been learned about her death, despite efforts by homicide detectives with the Fort Lauderdale Police Department and the Palm Beach Sheriff's Office, a private eye and a psychic.

The mysterious case is compounded by an inconclusive autopsy, no known witnesses and no apparent motive.

There hasn't been a lead to pursue for months now, said Phil Mundy, the Fort Lauderdale homicide detective assigned to the case.

Meanwhile, quietly and somberly, Jacques' family and friends continue to try to cope with the absence of the bright, college-bound girl.

"I think people can understand what we are going through without going into our personal emotions," said her mother, Louise Jacques. 'It's something you live with daily and we do the best we can."

To minimize their grief, Jacques and her husband, Warren, a tree surgeon in Trumball, have stopped calling police here to inquire about the case.

Last summer, Jacques' graduating class planted a tree in front of their high school in her memory. Their slain classmate had been accepted at the University of Hartford.

Jacques' best friend, Kara Buckley, the last known person to see Jacques alive, has gone on to the University of Rhode Island.

"She was always happy. I know that's what people always say about someone who isn't around anymore. But that's how she really was," Buckley said. "Even if something happened to get her down, it wouldn't last."

The case's baffling elements begin with Jacques' parting words to Buckley at 3:30 a.m. last April 26.

Leaving their room in the Mark 2100 Hotel on North Atlantic Boulevard, Jacques told Buckley and other friends she was going for a stroll on the beach. Buckley said she begged Jacques not to go alone.

But Mundy and others believe she really set out to find friends with whom she had been dancing and drinking earlier that night at another motel.

Someplace along the way -- Mundy theorizes between the motel and Sunrise Boulevard -- she vanished. "It probably was a stranger, probably an abduction by guile or by force, into a car," he said.

Robbery and sexual assault have been ruled out as motives. When Jacques' body was found, she was fully clothed and still wearing expensive jewelry.

Her body, found three days after she disappeared, was so decomposed that medical examiners could not determine the cause of death. There were no bruises, bullet wounds or other unusual injuries, Mundy said. Nor was there anything to suggest that the death was accidental.

While police checked into the whereabouts of criminals known to prey on young women and pursued other leads, Dinardo and a long-time friend of Jacques, Lynn Pastor, set out on their own.

"I hit every hotel, every bar on A1A, every side street, from the Marriott up to Commercial Boulevard," Dinardo said.

Dinardo said he came up with the names of several men who had checked out of hotels earlier than expected and had returned to their homes in other states. Through various means he eliminated each as a suspect.

Pastor, who grew up with Jacques in Connecticut and now lives in Fort Lauderdale, said she and Dinardo trekked to numerous bars and parties, carrying Jacques' photo, without success.

About the best chance of breaking the case -- one of only five unsolved homicides in Fort Lauderdale last year -- is if Jacques' assailant is jailed in an unrelated case and boasts of killing her to another inmate, police said.

Mundy, a veteran police officer, remains particularly frustrated over the Jacques case because it isn't a typical "whodunit" -- an unsolved murder for which police have several clues, suspects and possible motives.

It is difficult, too, to deal with the family when you have so little to tell them, Mundy said.

"It's hard to explain to a family why their daughter is dead," said Mundy, who has a daughter just one year older than Susan Jacques.